Re: Fun with C

[Paul Colin Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>]

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Elias Salomão Helou Neto <eshneto@gmail.com> sent on April 18th, 2011:

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|"> Uhm, no, that's a misunderstanding, Ada requires quite some thinking,  |
|> it is just that its basic types do not require so much thinking.        |
|>                                                                         |
|> I should stress one *major* concern of my favorite approach to          |
|> language definition:                                                    |
|>                                                                         |
|> Smart brains should not have to spend time with tackling basic          |
|> programming techniques.  In any language.  They should have all         |
|> their thinking capacity engaged in thinking about smart solutions.      |
|> Not in keeping track of types' implicit sizes. That's wasted effort.    |
|> (PC-lint -w 4 seems to confirm this view.)                              |
|                                                                          |
|There is no time spent thinking about promotions in C when you learn      |
|it. It is surely mor difficult to learn, so you've still made your        |
|point.                                                                    |
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|[..]"                                                                     |
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Hi,

It was suspected in John R. Anderson; and Robin Jeffries, "Novice LISP
Errors: Undetected Losses of Information from Working Memory",
"Human-Computer Interaction", Volume 1, 1985 that people can
successfully learn to overcome minor problems, but when they later are
trying to solve harder problems then they make simple mistakes which
they had already learnt to not make.

As an example, Elias Salomão Helou Neto has skillfully used English,
but seems to have misspelt "not" with "mor" when devoting brainpower
to a discussion instead of a spelling test.

Anyway, the C example explicitly involved  int  and  unsigned int  and
there is no guarantee that  int  is  signed int  though it is with
many compilers.